Google News Technical Requirements Site Structure and Speed

Architecture requirements specific to publishers

Every article needs a unique, permanent, crawlable URL that does not change once published — editing a URL after publication breaks any inbound links, syndication, and previously indexed signals. Category and section pages should link clearly to individual articles with real anchor text, and the site's internal linking should make the most recent and most important stories easy for Googlebot to discover within one or two clicks of the homepage.

Avoid paywalls or registration walls that block Googlebot from seeing the full article, unless implemented correctly via structured data marking the content as paywalled — otherwise Google may treat the article as cloaking, which is a serious policy violation that can affect the whole site's news eligibility, not just that article.

Speed and Core Web Vitals for news

Page experience signals apply to news the same way they do to any other content, but the stakes are higher because news readers bounce quickly if a page is slow, which suppresses both user engagement signals and Discover eligibility. Target Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 — publisher sites commonly fail LCP due to heavy ad stacks and oversized hero images loading above the fold.

Run a RankAudit crawl focused on Core Web Vitals across your highest-traffic article templates (not just the homepage), since ad density and third-party scripts often vary by section and a single homepage speed test misses the sections readers actually land on from search and Discover.

• Permanent, unique URLs per article — never change them post-publish
• LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1
• Never block Googlebot behind a paywall without proper markup
• Audit Core Web Vitals per template/section, not just the homepage

Key takeaways

• ✓Keep article URLs permanent and unique from the moment of publication
• ✓Meet Core Web Vitals thresholds on article templates specifically
• ✓Mark paywalled content correctly rather than hiding it from Googlebot
• ✓Audit speed by section, since ad load varies across the site

Why this lesson matters

This lesson belongs to Google News fundamentals, the part of News & Publisher SEO where the goal is: understand how google news and its indexing ecosystem work, and get the technical foundations right before chasing visibility.

Read it once, then do it straight away on a real site inside RankAudit. Nothing here is theory for its own sake — every step produces something you can show a client.

Do it now

1. 1Open RankAudit with sample data already loaded, so you are not stuck on setup.
2. 2Crawl a site and triage the issue list.
3. 3Run a RankAudit technical crawl of your publisher site and check it against the Google News technical requirements checklist.